Kyle Cavan — Something Small for Something Big
What does jewelry mean to you? Is it just something sparkly to hang from your ears, necks, and wrists? Or is it a sentimental object, passed down from generations of family members? To Kyle Cavan, jewelry isn’t just an accessory, but it’s a representation of hard work, friendships and accomplishments. This women-owned jewelry startup from Soho, New York focuses on providing commemorative pieces to young people attending colleges across the nations and celebrates their ambition and time spent on these campuses.
They hit their hundredth school in releasing pieces for three new universities, including UGA. I was lucky enough to sit down with company founder and designer Kyle Garcia at their launch party at the Graduate Athens Hotel to ask her a few questions about the influences behind the company and their new line of UGA-inspired necklaces, bracelets, and earrings.
Can you tell me a little bit about Kyle Cavan as a company and your founding? I read on your website that it started with you, your best friend, and your sister-in-laws, and I think that’s so cool how you're like a little family.
No, it is, and I think with it, it was really easy to capture what it means to be part of something bigger than yourself. I think my partners and I, and what we were trying to build, definitely captures that for us every day. But then also that's what we're kind of on a mission to create: you went to college, you have these great memories, you have all these moments to celebrate. This is a pinpoint in your life when you went off and got to create everything after. So how do you celebrate that? How do you cherish it? And in a new and refreshing way? For me, that story, and the way to tell that story was through jewelry. I've always loved it.
It was like the aha moment, right? When it came to me, I was at my five-year college reunion, and I was like, “Why don't I have a piece that I could wear forever?” And when I realized that, I was like, ‘Okay, cool. What is it going to take to create this?’
And we hope we're talking about it in the right way and that we're bringing about this moment for everyone to celebrate in a big way.
I read on your website that for the UGA collection, you guys were inspired by the traditions and symbols here on campus. Which traditions and symbols stood out to you when making the designs?
So, I think one of the coolest parts about UGA is the Arch, right? Here is this classic piece of architecture and here’s how we’ve interpreted it, and here’s how you can wear it forever. And when we talk about game day and being number one in the country, I think on some of our original designs it said “go dawgs” not “dawgs”. Some girls were like, “We wouldn’t wear it if it says go dawgs”, just silly stuff like that. And we wouldn’t have known to use “Glory, Glory” so we did a reflection with that aspect. And then we did one with 1785, the founding year, and that was a tradition for a lot of people. So for us, we really wanted to lean in there and say how you choose to wear it is up to you. These women don't want the status quo or what’s been around for a hundred years anymore. You need to be able to know what they want and you need feedback.
So I know you're not a UGA alumni, but what’s your favorite piece from this collection?
Honestly, it’s the Arch, for sure. It’s pretty cool. We tried to do it differently from our earlier architectural pieces that were a little bit flatter and lacked some dimension, but what's great is that in jewelry, and I think kind of in every industry, technologies of all shapes are able to do things we weren't able to do four or five years ago. So in this case, we are working with actual architects when designing the pieces. They're putting it into 3-D programming and they're printing that for us, so we're able to see replicas of what we're looking for.
What does it mean to you to be women-founded, women-owned, and women-run?
I think it’s phenomenal. Women have obviously been crushing it throughout every industry and I think they're finally getting notoriety for it. For us.
As women who speak to young college women, that's really something that is important to us. And in other parts of the jewelry world, you have companies led by women where they’re really consumer-led. Everything we do is based on customer feedback, everything we do is based on demand.
So being able to sit down with a widely younger generation than us and ask “What could we do better?” and have fully transparent conversations about it, I think it's the most exciting part for me to get to have this connection with young women.
What would you like young women who are wearing your pieces to know? What should your jewelry represent for them?
More than anything, we're trying to speak to them. It’s important to us that we have a community. I know we're not just selling jewelry. Being able to highlight women on our blog where we talk to people and understand, “How have you accomplished this?”, “What drove you here?”, “What led you here?” I think we just want you to know that we’re trying to have all of that built into our DNA. It's more than just a piece of jewelry you're carrying, you’re carrying a lot of other women who are also celebrating these moments, and to also celebrate what you have. That’s the big picture.
It looks like you guys have already grown tremendously over the past few years, but where do you see the future of your business going from here?
We have a few exciting launches coming up with a few new schools, and we're really focused on deepening a lot of our relationships with the schools.
We’ve had great success at schools that have known about us or that we've interacted with, and then there are schools that we’ve just launched at that we're constantly trying to generate word-of-mouth to reach out to them through alumni chapters or through social media.
And then we have a few fun collaborations coming up in the next year that I'm really excited about.
We're also really leaning outside of our typical shield and architecture pieces. We’re really leaning into the colored stones or how to bring color back into this moment, again, in an understated way, but just something a little bit more polished than your everyday beads.
Do you think that you guys will ever move away from the college or Greek life scene?
Of course there's opportunities, but our base has always been college and Greek life. And I think that we could stay in this lane and focus here for a while and be able to reach more schools and be able to reach more young women. We have a hundred schools, but there are thousands, so we are still not serving everyone we could be.
It's actually one of the reasons that we launched Greek, because at that time, I think we had maybe fifty schools, and on our site we kept getting requests for different schools, and we were like “Oh man, we are never going to get here in time”. We have a long way to go there too. We have a lot more chapters to add, but with Greek, we felt like maybe we could have national presence that way.